The Bridge, BBC Four, review

The Øresund Bridge, which swoops from Copenhagen in Denmark to Malmö in Sweden, is the longest in Europe. It’s also the most galumphing piece of symbolism. While Britain’s rail link to France is buried beneath the Channel, hidden from view like a dirty secret, the Scandinavian neighbours flaunt their mutual friendship in this vast concrete handshake that can be seen for miles around.

The Bridge (BBC Four) – the latest gripping drama to emerge from Denmark, hot on the heels of Borgen and The Killing – was named after the Øresund, and Saturday’s atmospheric opening double bill began with the discovery of a chimera of a corpse slap bang at its midpoint. The cadaver’s top half, which lay just inside Swedish territory, was quickly identified as the torso of a prominent Malmö city councillor. The leggy end, stretching on to the Danish side of the border, belonged to a Copenhagen prostitute who had gone missing over a year before.

This was a crime of mind-boggling meticulousness that only a psychopath – or an exceptionally devious screenwriter – could have dreamt up. Who deposited the bodies, and why, are the questions that will keep us glued to this series over the next five weeks. They also provided the excuse to bring together one of the most peculiar detective double acts in recent TV history: Saga Norén (Sofia Helin) and Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia).

She’s a young, attractive Swede, one who wears tight leather trousers, and was seen propositioning a stranger in a bar with the immortal (and successful) line, “Would you like to come back to my apartment and have sex with me?”. Subtle, she ain’t. Strangely, she had more than a little in common with the Claire Danes character in Channel 4’s CIA drama Homeland: both are borderline-autistic blondes whose talent for unpicking horrific crimes with an uncanny forensic froideur is the flipside of an inability to empathise with others.

Rohde, her opposite in more ways than one, is a middle-aged Danish detective with a world-weary manner and a face like an unmade bed. The programme joined him the day after he’d had a vasectomy (having already fathered five children by three different women, it seemed a wise decision) so he walked with a limp and sat with a grimace. He spent much of the opening episodes trying to coax a smile out of Saga, or to cajole her into eating breakfast – and failed on both counts.

In between, the pair tried to get to the bottom of the crime on the bridge, while a kaleidoscope of suspicious supporting characters wheeled past the camera. They may or may not turn out to be crucial to the murder plot. The programme was in no hurry to tell us – it unfurled in the indulgent, richly satisfying manner of a drama that knows it has another eight hours to play with.

Beautifully shot in a permanent crepuscular gloom, this was more than a detective story, it was a complex tale of two cultures. And it suggested that it will take more than a bridge to overcome the gulf between them.